The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice
By Geoff Simons
Macmillan Press, 1998
363 pp., $47.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
When asked in 1996 whether the death of a million children in Iraq as a result of six years of US-imposed sanctions was justified, Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations and now President Clinton's secretary of state, replied, "We think the price is worth it".
Out of their own mouths, they condemn themselves — Albright, Clinton and his Democrat government, and the Liberal-Labor doubles team in Australia, which rushed to the aid of President George Bush in the 1991 slaughter and have since joined in the more leisurely slaughter via sanctions.
So, too, the establishment media, loudly condemning Saddam Hussein now that he is an official demon but, on the sanctions' murderous ways, as silent as the graves that hold the bodies of a million murdered infants.
Geoff Simons has chronicled the eight years of sanctions against Iraq, nominally organised through the UN but politically driven by the US, which have followed the military assault that reduced Iraq to pre-industrial squalor.
Pretexts
The "Gulf crisis" began because of oil and continues because of oil. When Kuwait ("an oil well with a seat in the UN" and a compliant proxy for western oil interests) threatened to come under the sway of Iraq and so tilt the resource and strategic balance away from the US and its western allies, it was all hands to the slaughter.
The military cocktail included napalm, depleted-uranium shells, the "fuel-air explosive" with its massive fireball that sucks the oxygen out of people lungs and the Rockeye cluster bomb, a cheeky little number which "unleashes 247 'anti-personnel' grenades that individually explode into 2000 high-velocity razor-sharp fragments that effectively shred people and that are ill-equipped to distinguish between soldier and civilian".
With Iraq ruined by seven Hiroshima bombs' worth of destruction, the US still searched for new pretexts and new means of keeping the screws on. Sanctions, which kill without all the blood and gore and political fuss of a military war, were imposed as the means to meet the new "threats": Iraq might invade Kuwait again (fabricated pretext); Iraq persecuted the Kurds (real pretext, but the US did nothing about Turkey's persecution of the Kurds); and Iraq had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction (a hypocritical pretext by the US, a world leader in this class of weapon).
As Simons points out, the US has never had a principled opposition to political regimes that abuse human rights, or invade other lands, or possess weapons of mass destruction. While official enemies who get in the road of global US strategic and economic interests earn the wrath of the US, friends which look after US interests are supported, even if, like Indonesia and Israel, for example, they are invasion and occupation specialists, and stout abusers of human rights.
The whole "Gulf crisis" — the war and the sanctions — is no more than inhuman, hypocritical calculation by the US to aid "US capitalist penetration for private profit" in the Middle East and the rest of the world. This is why we have the establishment media to present US- imposed wars and sanctions as righteous crusades by the "international community" on behalf of democracy and decency.
Human cost
Whilst the compliant corporate media jump from their orgasmic celebration of US bombs and missiles to fuming denunciations of Iraqi "deception" over its weapons program, the growing mountain of reports on the effects of the sanctions is ignored.
Various UN humanitarian agencies (FAO, UNICEF, WHO), aid workers, physicians and nurses, journalists and the International Red Cross, none of whom can be accused of being apologists for Saddam Hussein, have concurred on the human cost of the sanctions.
Up to 2 million Iraqis are dead from starvation and disease, more than half of these babies and children. Five thousand children die every month.
Hospitals are "denuded of drugs and disinfectants, of bandages and sheets, where dying infants lie on plastic or blood-stained mattresses and have their wounds wrapped in dirty cardboard".
Iraq, which used to import 70% of its food, is starving to death, and malnutrition and lack of medicines have resulted in the return of epidemics of cholera, typhoid, polio, giardia, pertussis and rickets. No disease in the medical literature has failed to make a comeback in this public health disaster, a case of US biological warfare delivered by sanctions.
Stillbirths, congenital malformations and children blind for want of insulin are all on the rise. Contraceptive devices, too, are a victim of the sanctions, and unsafe abortions and caesareans (performed with no anaesthetic) boost the maternal mortality figures.
The sanctions prevent Iraq from reconstructing its shattered economy, and social disintegration continues apace, with poverty breeding begging, prostitution, scavenging, theft and crime in the struggle to survive.
In the comfort of their offices in New York, the US representatives on the US-dominated UN Sanctions Committee (UNSCOM) carry on their work, untroubled by the groans and cries of death.
So-called "dual-use" products are caught in the vicious trade embargo net. Surgical scissors? No go — they could be melted down to make bullets! Children's clothing? No way — they could be unstitched to make soldiers' uniforms! Glue for schoolbooks? Are you kidding — the glue could be diverted to industry!
As everything from food and industrial equipment to pencil sharpeners and ping pong balls is banned by the vindictive veto of the US representatives, the bodies of Iraqis, young and old, pile up for burial. Even after death the sanctions get them — burial shrouds are also embargoed.
US tactics of delay and blocking also hamper the on-again off-again oil-for-food deal, whereby Iraq can sell a limited amount of oil for food and medicine.
The deal itself is not all that it is cracked up to be. Its propaganda value ("see, the US has a heart") outweighs its real impact.
The Iraqi revenue from oil sales is first siphoned off to other US-determined projects, such as paying its arms suppliers and industrial reconstruction contractors in Kuwait. What is left over amounts to $2 per week per capita, a paltry humanitarian bucket to the ocean of need in Iraq.
Who benefits
The US is determined to keep the sanctions going, even in the face of substantial compliance by Iraq with information provision, monitoring and access to sites for UNSCOM weapons inspectors. It is determined despite becoming increasingly isolated in its hard-line stance as rival capitalist powers weigh up the benefits of sanctions (big oil profits) and the costs (the lost trade opportunities).
Sanctions and the demon Hussein are politically valuable to the US. Clinton, so stingy with rice and stethoscopes, can readily find $1.2 million a throw for each of the 67 cruise missiles he has authorised be fired at Iraq.
Texas oilmen celebrate the rise in oil prices and share dividends that come from keeping cheap Iraqi oil off the market.
The US government strives to maintain a "military and commercial grip on the oil-rich region" and, through the educative effect of the 1991 war and the eight years of sanctions, aims to intimidate any other countries which may flirt with a challenge to US imperialist interests. "The pain of distant peoples does not matter if profits are to be made."
As the sanctions continue to work their silent genocide, they point a gory finger at politicians worldwide, including Howard and Beazley, who all deserve to be asked, as President Johnson was during the Vietnam War, "How many kids have you killed today?".